No Country for Winter Athletes

“This has been so demoralizing,” Shiva Keshavan, India’s top luger, said over Skype last month. “It must be one of the greatest humiliations in the history of Indian sports.” He was sitting in a hotel room in Italy, where he had spent much of January training for the Winter Olympics, and where he had just learned that the International Olympic Committee would not allow India’s delegation to Sochi—Keshavan and two skiers, Nadeem Iqbal and Himanshu Thakur—to compete under its country’s tricolor flag. Instead, Keshavan and his teammates will march into Fisht Olympic Stadium in Sochi tomorrow as independent participants under the Olympic flag.

The events that led to the I.O.C.’s decision began in early December, 2012, when it suspended the Indian Olympic Association for electing officials who were facing charges of corruption. The I.O.C. also demanded that India’s sports ministry stop meddling in the affairs of the I.O.A. (The national Olympic bodies of Ghana, Kuwait, and Panama have all gone through periods of suspension in recent years on similar charges of political interference.) Through last year, the Committee pressed the I.O.A. to incorporate an ethics clause into its constitution and to elect new officials, so that it could be welcomed back into the Olympic fold. In the first week of 2014, the I.O.A. scheduled its elections for February 9th—two days after the Sochi Games begin, and too late for Keshavan, Iqbal, and Thakur.

Holding the elections any earlier would have “created complications,” an anonymous I.O.A. source told Agence France-Presse, without elaborating. “It is sad that this is the first time ever that the Indian contingent will not be carrying the national flag during the Winter Olympics,” V. K. Malhotra, the I.O.A.’s acting president, told The Outdoor Journal. “However, the Indian Winter Olympic athletes don’t stand a chance of winning any medals either.”

Unless your discipline of choice is cricket, India is no country for athletes. Infrastructure is scant, government support is provided grudgingly, and sports associations are rife with politicking. (The marksman Abhinav Bindra, the only Indian to have ever won an individual Olympic gold medal, famously titled a chapter in his autobiography “Mr. Indian Official: Thanks for Nothing.”) Winter sports are the most neglected, their slaloming and luging and alpine skiing unrecognizable to many Indians, most of whom live in climates with temperatures that range from mild to scorching. For India’s three Olympians, the new proscription against competing under their flag has added a special ignominy to their usual travails. “I’ve never seen our officials prioritize Indian sports or Indian athletes at all,” Keshavan said. Other countries, even with their own challenges, look hospitable in comparison. “Russia’s also corrupt, probably more so than India. But in the couple of decades since the Soviet Union broke up, they’ve won a hundred times more medals than we have.”

The thirty-two-year-old Keshavan will be participating in his fifth Winter Games. He set a speed record for Asia in 2012 and won the Asian Luge Cup in 2011 and 2012, but he has not been so dominant on the world stage; his best Olympic performance remains a twenty-fifth-place finish at Turin, in 2006.

Keshavan grew up in the northern hill town of Manali, where he started skiing at the age of six, tramping up the slopes after every run because there were no ski lifts. When he was fourteen, he failed to make the national ski team, which he attributes to nepotism. “I was disillusioned, but then, a couple of months later, this invitation arrived to participate in a luge camp in a nearby town,” he said. “It seemed like divine intervention.”

Günther Lemmerer, a luge coach from Austria, had been travelling around the world to find new talent for the International Luge Federation, the sport’s governing body, when he arrived in India, in a town where it never snows, not even in the winter. Presented with a clutch of skiers of varying talent, Lemmerer first screened “Cool Runnings”; then he attached wheels to a sled and had the campers zip down a hilly road. Two years later, in 1998, Keshavan was India’s flag bearer and sole representative at the Nagano Winter Olympics. “I was thinking to myself, Who’s going to be watching this back home, anyway?” he recalled. “Then I stepped into the stadium, and a roar went up, and I thought, Oh my god, this is huge!” Just after the opening ceremony, the Jamaican bobsled team walked up to Keshavan and told him that they had to stick together. Keshavan thanked them, then set about borrowing a warm jacket and a luge from the South Korean team.

There are still no luge tracks in India, so, during the summer in Manali, Keshavan makes do with strength and endurance training and an occasional roll down a highway on a wheeled sled. (In a promotional stunt video, he whips past a herd of sheep trooping uphill, glides under a truck that blocks the street, and weaves through dense traffic.) During the winter, he rotates through a circuit of luge tournaments overseas, rehearsing and competing, trying to shave seconds off his run times.

Such a life style does not come cheap. Keshavan discovered this early on, when his family spent five thousand dollars to prepare and send him to his first Olympics. He could afford to buy and customize his own luge only in 2006; the cost of a fully tricked-out sled approached eight thousand dollars, he said, and he had preferred to pour his resources into travel and training. Now a fundraising veteran, Keshavan has coaxed some money, including a salary for a coach, out of the Indian government; for the rest, he looks to sponsors and N.G.O.s. Last year, he started an online campaign, with Bollywood celebrities to plug his cause, aimed at raising a million rupees—roughly sixteen thousand dollars. His compatriots at Sochi, both of them first-time Olympians, were not nearly as organized, and they received government funds for new skis just two weeks before the start of the Games.

The negotiation of all these hurdles to even reach the Olympics must be so wearying, I said to Keshavan, that the race itself must feel like an anti-climax, its appeal and excitement diminished. But the spirit of sport is remarkably durable, and Keshavan talked about how, as he hurled himself forward at the start of a run, he got fired up by the energy of the crowd. “The rest of the time, it’s a very introspective sport,” he said. “You have to merge with the sled. The high speed awakens your sense of awareness. Time slows down.” He remembered a moment from the Nagano Olympics. In the middle of his run, he had tilted his head back for maximum aerodynamic effect, and in that moment he saw a giant Indian flag flapping above the track. “It felt exhilarating. It felt like the flag was urging me along,” Keshavan said. “Which is why, even if I’m holding the Olympic flag at Sochi, I know in my heart that I’m representing India. I just know it.”

Samanth Subramanian is the India correspondent for The National and the author of “Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast.”

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